The Methodology

The points

Each rendition of the dish was scored in five categories.

We ranked the chicken, the batter, and the sauce on a scale of one-to-five whereas flavor profile was four points. A final point was given for presentation whereby a restaurant asserted even a modicum of effort in that department.

Shocking as it may be - we somehow landed on a brilliantly simple 20-point scale. As much as I’d like to get all FiveThirtyEight up in here, our project didn’t demand the detail of the burrito search. We also wanted to remove as many variables as possible seeing as each “dish” was graded based on the merits of a single presentation.

With one exception, this meant both /u/cured_meats and I needed to be present for a dish to be considered. There were at least a few times where we ventured on our own to see if a sample was worthy and when that wasn’t the case, the restaurant was summarily knocked off the map.

The contenders

The next goal was to tackle which restaurants we would visit for this project. Meats and I are both well-versed in metro Atlanta eateries, so while we self-identified a few places, we also crowd-sourced this to minimize the chance of missing any diamonds. We polished these results via impromptu conversations with a handful of other fellow Atlanta food nuts. The crowd-sourced information was derived from the many online posts we found where even a whisper of General Tso’s was made but mostly from this post on the /r/Atlanta subreddit.